Remaking a website and redirecting old pages?

[mikedorrphoto]

Hello,

I was recently hired by a company to remake their website. They get a lot of traffic and are ranked pretty high in search results. Their current site is hideous and needs a complete remake from the ground up.

I’m wondering what the best way to go about this is. If they have a page about “how to cook a steak” but the current address is theirsite.com/1-5.html and I want to take the content over to the new site and put it into theirsite.com/how-to-make-a-steak/ , after making the new site, can I delete the old files and add a redirect from 1-5.html to the new page for all those who have it bookmarked or backlinked? How will that effect the search ranking?

Is there a better way to go about redoing this site? Any advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

-Mike

[standuncan]

Definitely add redirects or you will lose that ranking. I have used 301 redirects on a couple past sites (super easy) and to my knowledge (I’m not in the SEO dept at my employment) these sites did not lose ranking and are now gaining rank with the new semantic markup and clean urls since it’s been a bit of time.

Our of curiosity, do they have previous analytics installed or how do you know how much traffic and how are you looking at their page rank?

[mikedorrphoto]

Thank you for the reply. I’m glad you have had positive experiences with 301 redirects.

I installed analytics on their current site about 2 weeks ago. So far, over 150,000 unique visitors. They have over 250 pages with unclear urls, but many people linking to those pages.

Another person I work with uses software called Market Samurai to check page ranking.

-Mike

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